SAVE THE DATES: The Annual General Meeting of Californians forElectoral Reform will be Saturday May 22nd, 1:30pm to 4:30pm at theBerkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge Street (at Shattuck). Therewill be a party in the evening. The Leadership Retreat will be all daySunday May 23rd. Details will be in the election mailing, which willbe sent to all members. (If you are behind in your dues, you will needto pay them in order for your vote to be counted.)

We have a lot of catching up to do. We haven't produced a newsletterin almost a year, and I apologize for the delay.

Part of the problem has been that we haven't had someone in charge ofcontent. We do now, and I'd like to introduce Laurel Palomares, ourNewsletter Content Editor. Forrest Crumpley continues as ourNewsletter Publisher. (I had been acting as content editor but doing avery poor job of it.)

So let me now bring you up to date on electoral reform activity aroundthe state and nation.

Thanks to the efforts, educational and otherwise, of the East Baychapter, the City of Berkeley passed an IRV enabling charter amendmentthis March by an overwhelming majority of 72%! This is a veryimportant victory, as we now have three cities in Alameda County(Berkeley, Oakland, and San Leandro) calling for the use of IRV. SeeKenny Mostern's article for the amazing details.

San Francisco is on track to use IRV this November. As you may recall,it was supposed to use IRV last November, and our members lobbied theBoard of Supervisors and the Secretary of States office to try to makethat happen. We even raised money for a lawsuit to force the City touse IRV. Unfortunately, we ran into a perfect storm. The Secretary ofState's office had yet to certify the equipment for IRV, and deniedcertification to the fall-back partial hand-count procedure. Thesurprise recall election placed an unexpected burden on the ElectionsDepartment, and the judge ruled that, while technically illegal, hewould let San Francisco use its two-round runoff system one last time.The good news is that all parties (the Elections Department, thevendor, and the Secretary of State's office) made good progress towardshaving the equipment certified in time for next November's election.The certification hearing was held April 8th, and the equipment wasapproved.

Thanks to the persistence of our own Paula Lee, the League of WomenVoters of California now has a position supporting IRV that can be usedby any local League as well. We'll have an article about this in afuture newsletter.

The California Democratic Party added language to its platform callingfor an exploration of alternative voting systems, including IRV. Thisis a major change in their position; previously they had rejected IRVand PR out of hand.

State Senator John Vasconcellos has introduced SCA 14 in order to curesome of the problems affecting California. Among the many reforms itincludes is IRV for all state offices from Assembly to Governor. CfERhas endorsed SCA 14, and we will be working with Senator Vasconcellosto fine-tune the language. We will also see if we can get at leastenabling language for PR for the legislature as well.

Speaking of PR for the legislature, on New Year's Day the SacramentoBee published its own list of suggested reforms, including a 300-memberunicameral legislature, with at least some of the members elected usingPR to solve the dual problems of gerrymandering and uncompetitiveelections.

On the national scene, two of the Democratic Presidential candidates,former front-runner Howard Dean and contender Dennis Kucinich, hadpublically endorsed IRV during their campaigns. Kucinich also calledfor PR. Ralph Nader's entry into the race is raising the visibility ofthe need for IRV.

Also nationally, all five Pacifica Radio stations, including KPFA inBerkeley and KPFK in Los Angeles, used Choice Voting to elect theirLocal Station Boards this year. I believe this is the largest use ofPR by an organization in the United States. Over 15,000 voters usedand returned their ranked choice ballots. (Over 95,000 were mailedout.)

Turning back to internal matters, we had an excellent Annual GeneralMeeting last May. San Francisco Board of Supervisors President MattGonzalez gave a great keynote speech on election reform. The meetingwas well-attended.

Also at the AGM we elected our new Board. Rob Latham (who has moved toUtah and is doing great work there) and Larry Shoup did not run forre-election. Dave Kadlecek, Paula Lee, Pete Martineau, Casey Peters,Dave Robinson, Marda Stothers, and I were all re-elected. New boardmember Thomas Krouse was elected for the first time, and we welcome thenew blood he brings to the Board. Last but not least, foundingPresident Jim Lindsay was also elected, and we welcome him back; hisleadership was sorely missed.

New officers were later chosen: I continue as President, Paula Lee asExecutive Vice President, and Marda Stothers as Treasurer. DaveRobinson is our Secretary, and Dave Kadlecek is Chief FinancialOfficer.

Our next AGM will be May 22nd; save the date!

We are still looking for people who want to help with maintaining theweb site, recruiting new members, and coordinating volunteers. If youwould like to assist in any of these tasks, please contact me at650-962-8412 or via info@c... We'd also like to know more aboutour members, so please fill out the membership survey and mail it backto us.

Finally, we haven't been dropping members in arrears because we haven'tbeen sending out the newsletter. If you haven't renewed because youhadn't heard from us and thought we had gone inactive, please renew.If you can't find your renewal, go to our website (www.cfer.org; notethe new URL) and click on the "join" link. As you can see we're veryactive and we need your support.

The Yes on Measure I: IRV For Berkeley campaign won a dramatic victoryin Berkeley, California, capturing 72% of the vote in the March 2, 2004election. From the start, we believed that 50.1% was not an adequategoal for our campaign. This is because implementation of IRV requiresadministrative approval at the County level, where the Registrar ofVoters has been resistant to reform. By striving for and achievingsuch a resounding victory, we have paved the way for greater democracythroughout Alameda County.

STALWART PARTICIPANTS IN THE CAMPAIGN

Our high profile campaign was made possible primarily through theefforts of four organizations and three City Councilors. Members ofthe League of Women Voters of Berkeley, Albany, and Emeryville,Californians for Electoral Reform, and the Green Party of AlamedaCounty formed the core group that began meeting in early December todiscuss the campaign. At the same time, the Center for Voting andDemocracy came through with the seed money to hire a professionalcampaign manager. This gave the campaign the staff time toaggressively raise more money, to pay for professional design, and tocreate a plan for getting the message out to the entire city.

Additionally, a fifth group, the Wellstone Democratic Renewal Club,played an especially important role providing volunteer help in thefinal weeks of the campaign.

While having a Campaign Manager was useful, we could not have triumphedwithout the incredible energy of our volunteer Steering Committee andour extensive list of volunteer workers. Individuals who requirespecific mention include:

* Councilmembers Dona Spring, Mim Hawley, and Kriss Worthington contributed endorsements and some combination of fundraising lists and time to the campaign.* Nancy Bickel, President of the League of Women Voters, and John Selawsky, Green Party County Councillor and President of the Berkeley School Board, did terrific jobs as Campaign Spokespersons.* Jack-of-all-trades and Campaign Co-Coordinator Dave Heller put in countless hours literally doing whatever needed to be done, both professional and menial.* Jim Lindsay announced he did not have time to be Volunteer Coordinator, had his arm twisted, and performed above the call of duty.* Budd Dickinson kept a firm, economically conservative eye on the Treasury, putting in many more hours than he had planned because he had not believed we would be able to raise as much money as we did!

Others far too numerous to list contributed their time in large andsmall ways, and we are grateful to every single person whoparticipated.

MESSAGES

The successful San Francisco campaign of 2002 gave our campaign itsfirst important message: runoffs are bad. In our graphics, on ourwebsite, and in our public statements we always emphasized thatcitywide December runoffs cost 0,000, while they have 28% lowerturnout than November elections.

However, the peculiarities of Berkeley led us to also develop two otherkey messages. First, the activists in this campaign wanted a positivespin on IRV, not merely a negative spin on runoffs. As a result, ourcampaign slogan became "Cut Costs, Expand Democracy." The second halfof that slogan allowed us to laud the advantages of having majoritywinners, having more people enter elections, and having positiveissue-based campaigns because candidates need to appeal to each other'svoters and therefore can't attack each other.

Second, at my urging, the campaign dared to use the "Ralph Nader wouldhave gotten 5% AND Al Gore would have been President" argument. Thereare key reasons why this was the right argument for Berkeley in 2004,reasons that are not applicable to other cities or perhaps even toother years in Berkeley: (1) Berkeley has an overwhelming number ofDemocrats, many of whom consider themselves Progressives; (2) Greensoutnumber Republicans in the city; and (3) the motivating force forvoter turnout this election was the Democratic Primary, in whichBerkeley voters would overwhelmingly be people thinking about how todefeat George W. Bush. I believe the campaign's success vindicatesthis controversial strategy. At the same time, I would not recommendrepeating this in most places without very clear poll numbers showingthat it would be effective.

Finally, it is important to mention that we refused to downplay thefact that we actually want to implement IRV. Resisting the temptationto say "this measure only permits IRV, it does not implement it," wemade the conscious decision to sell IRV's advantages and ask people tocome out in favor. We believe that when you say "well, this onlyallows us to consider IRV as one possibility," there is the appearanceof a certain bait and switch that creates suspicion in the voter'smind. Since all the individuals and groups working on the campaignactually advocate IRV, not the further study of IRV, it made sense tous to say that forthrightly.

MONEY

The campaign plan made in mid-December, after the hire of the CampaignManager, called for a low-ball budget of ,900 and a high-end budgetof ,700, and suggested how the campaign could cope at each end.Happily, we raised over ,000, allowing us to spend nearly ,000 onprint materials, to send a mailing to permanent absentee voters, and topay for all our professional staffing needs. Of this, the Center forVoting and Democracy was at 00 by far our largest contributor;however, all the organizations at the center of the campaigncontributed both money and lists or events at which we could raisefunds.

FIELD SUCCESSES

The primary means we got the word out in this campaign was throughSaturday morning precinct mobilizations, which were for sevenconsecutive weekends from January 17 to February 28. Averaging around20 precinct walkers per week, we succeeded in hand delivering nearly25,000 pieces door to door. With an additional absentee mailing of4818, this means that nearly 30,000 voters, a number larger thanactually voted in this election, received materials from us.

In addition, the campaign ran a successful phone bank the last twoweekends, dropped thousands of pieces at cafes and laundromats, and hadmore than a dozen people posted at public transportation hubs andsupermarkets in the last four days of the election. The worst thingyou can say about our field plan is that due to the lateness incollecting the money we needed, we ordered our lawn signs too late. Ofcourse, Dave Heller came through as always, personally posting 100 ofthe 150 signs we managed to put up throughout the city in the last fourdays of the campaign.

WHAT'S NEXT

Of course, IRV is not implemented by this measure, and it could stilltake several years to get it implemented, so electoral reform advocateshave much to do.

In Alameda County we face a Registrar of Voters who has repeatedlyexpressed his opposition to implementing IRV. As a result, we need toexert substantial political pressure on the Registrar, to the point heunderstands that either he moves forward with the will of the people,or his job may be at stake. This is why achieving our 72% is such afundamental achievement.

Immediately, we need a majority of the County Board of Supervisors(three members) who will bring the issue to the fore. Berkeley'srepresentative, Keith Carson, is already signed on as an advocate ofIRV. Two other cities in the County, Oakland and San Leandro, alreadyallow for IRV elections in their charters, and the three citiestogether represent nearly half the population of the County. As aresult, our immediate strategy needs to be to approach the other CountySupervisors, and ask them to move forward.

If we are able to attain the support of three county supervisors, andto point to the certification of San Francisco's voting equipment as amodel for moving forward with the equipment in Alameda County, webelieve it will then be smooth sailing to actually implement IRV inBerkeley, perhaps even by the 2006 elections.

AB1039 would have allowed general law cities to use alternativeelection systems to elect their representatives. Currently, onlycharter cities can adopt alternative systems, by amending the citycharter with voter approval. AB1039, unfortunately, is dead. While itreceived support from the League of California Cities, it was opposedby the California Association of Clerks and Election Officials (CACEO),and that killed it. CACEO opposed AB1039 primarily for two reasons: itdid not define the terms cumulative voting (CuV), limited voting (LV),choice voting (ChV), and instant runoff voting (IRV), and it left theimplementation of those systems to the Secretary of State's office. Incontrast, the Elections Code goes into great detail as to how toconduct an election using first-past-the-post, two-round runoff, andblock vote (the name for a plurality election that elects more than onewinner, as in an at-large election for city council): the layout of theballot, the instructions to voters, even how to count the ballots andhow to resolve ties.

CACEO wanted to see similar language for IRV, LV, CuV, and ChV, and weare working on a bill that does just that. (It is forty pages long andcounting, compared to the half-page of AB1039, but that is what isrequired.) We showed an early draft to the chair of CACEO's ElectionLegislation Committee, who approved of our approach, and we plan tomeet with their full committee this spring.

We'd like to know more about you; what political party you'reaffiliated with, what your level of interest is in the electoral reformmovement, what skills you have and are willing to contribute to thecause. Please take a few minutes to fill this out and send it back tous. Feel free to leave blank anything you don't want to tell us.

GENERAL COMMENTS ON CALIFORNIANS for ELECTORAL REFORM: _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________